Network independant Content filtering

[erol-yildiz]

Hi,

Some of our students use their cell phones as a hotspot and bypassing our on-premises content. Is there a way to prevent this by a policy or by integrating a 3rd party solution? 

Best,

[Jalves]

We pay for Securly. We deploy the app and a proxy profile and that handles our content filtering at home on our one to one student iPads.  This will prevent the hot spot situation you are running into. We also have the ability to add VPNs blocked on the iPad. Surprisingly we have not had any issues with the at home content filtering. 

[erol-yildiz]

Hi, thank you for your answer. Does the proxy profile redirect http/https traffic to your on premise content filtering service or does it use Securly cloud content management system? For just content filtering, do we need to install the Securly app?

[sdagley]

@erol-yildiz  My approach when I was in EDU was to have a script that ensured that the school's SSID was the 1st SSID listed for the preferred network, and then there was a LaunchDaemon triggered by a Network State Change which would run a different script to see if the active Wi-Fi connection was the school SSID, and if not it would check to see if the school SSID was available and if it was the script would turn Wi-Fi off and back on again so that it would re-connect to the school's SSID. You'll find the first script posted to a couple of threads on Jamf Nation, but I never posted the 2nd one and no longer have a copy.

[sdagley]

I should add that if I were writing that 2nd script again I'd check the signal strength on the SSID I wanted to enforce to be sure it was usable. We had a 1:1 program so students could take their Macs home, and one student lived close enough for their Mac to detect the school's 2.4GHz SSIDs but not get a usable connection which was a problem because the enforcement script prevented them from using their home Wi-Fi.

[erol-yildiz]

Thank you for your reply.

[mainelysteve]

We use Cisco Umbrella presently which has an app for iPadOS and a configuration profile that configures the DNS proxy setting so no matter which network that iPad or Mac is on, it will be filtered.  Some like Securly use pac files with the content filtering payload as well. 

Most of our students join our guest wireless on their phones anyhow so if they attempted to use a phone hotspot most aren't smart enough to disconnect that and use their LTE connection.

Which filtering product are you using?

[erol-yildiz]

Hi, thank you for your answer. We have Fortigate firewall and we use its content filtering.